Wellbeing Room

Hello!

I have had lots of requests to write about our new ‘Wellbeing Room’ here at Sherwood Forest Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, so here comes the story of how it came about!

My colleague Claire, went on a wellbeing conference and came back full of ideas and enthusiasm around what we could do here in finance to raise awareness of the importance of health & wellbeing. I had been working on the ‘Great place to work’ toolkit and as we were discussing the two areas and the idea for turning one of our meeting rooms into a wellbeing room was born.

The idea is that the room can still be used as a meeting room if required but the space is reserved for anyone to access between 12pm and 2pm. It holds lots of information about wellbeing, where to access help and advice locally, staff wellbeing activities (more about this later!) and about the behaviours we expect ALL finance staff to exhibit – these are from the finance behaviours toolkit on the FFF website. We are building in the golden thread into all our communications and job adverts to ensure we encourage the right people to apply.

We have put a mindfulness colouring book in the room, there will also be a jigsaw in there and every month we will be running a competition. The competitions will vary and we have tried to make it themed with the seasons and what is happening ie: Easter egg hunt.

We are also going to do a few sessions a month and the ideas are:
Tea on Tuesday – 12pm – 2pm everyone is invited to have a drink some cake and come and socialise in the wellbeing room (it’s good to talk!). 
Walking Wednesday – 12.30pm everyone who wants to will lace up the trainers and walk to the reservoir, round the res and back. It will be just shy of 2 miles.
Fruity Friday is another idea, we are very lucky that we have a fruit and veg stand outside of the hospitals main doors part of our healthier communities strategy so the senior team will take it in turns to donate a few pounds to purchase some fruit for all.

Initial feedback from finance staff and others has been really encouraging, our CEO Richard Mitchell has been to see the room and loves the concept and wants communications to do a piece on what we are doing for our colleagues mental and physical wellbeing. Richard also wants to put us in the Trusts team brief as an outstanding service, this makes me feel like we are getting things right!
 
Onwards and Upwards!

If anyone has any other ideas they would like to share please let us know @FinanceSfh.
Thanks for reading!
Ellie